Planck Mission: Goals, Early Results and Analysis Challenges

Precise measurement of the Cosmic Microwave Background (CMB) anisotropies can accurately constrain many cosmological models and parameters. Over the last decade measurements of CMB anisotropy has spearheaded the remarkable transition of cosmology into a precision science. Nevertheless, much more information about the universe remains to be extracted from CMB anisotropy, specially from polarization. The current and future CMB missions are aimed to probe the early universe, in particular cosmological inflation, at unprecedented accuracy. However, extracting maximum amount of science from these high-resolution-low-noise data-rich experiments also pose a stiff challenge to current analysis techniques. The analysis techniques must not only be computationally fast to contend with the huge size of the datasets, but the higher sensitivity also limits the simplifying assumptions which could then be invoked to achieve the desired speed without compromising the final precision goals. The effect of asymmetric beams is perhaps the most important and challenging systematic effect in the current and future CMB missions. We have developed and implemented a very fast pixel based method to account for this systematic effect in Planck analyses. This presentation will broadly describe the Planck mission, its goals, analysis challenges and the early astrophysical results announced on
January 11, 2011, with special emphasis on the systematic effect of asymmetric beams.